


the stars, the shattered glass, the sea

by crownsandbirds



Series: it should be enough [2]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Beach House, Character Study, Daddy Issues, Depression, Divorce, Eating Disorders, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Living Together, M/M, Marriage, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Suicide Attempt, Past Violence, Post-Divorce, Psychosis, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, implied homicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-10-10 12:18:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17425745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownsandbirds/pseuds/crownsandbirds
Summary: "'Do you ever see whales?' he asks.Ging turns his head lazily. 'Hm?''Whales.'It makes absolutely no sense, but Ging looks around the aisles and his brown eyes shine a little. 'Mm. Sometimes. Mostly blue whales.'Pariston looks at him, and almost hates how badly he loves him."Ging and Pariston's complicated history.





	1. bone-white afternoon

**Author's Note:**

> "There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages, I’m bleeding,  
> I’m not just making conversation.  
> There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western, Henry,  
> it’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard out of the bone white afternoon.  
> [...]  
> but we always win and we never quit, see, we’ve won again, here we are at the place  
> where I get to beg for it  
> where I get to say Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our  
> clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?  
> or will I say  
> Roll over and let me fuck you till you puke, Henry, you owe me this much, you can indulge me  
> this at least, can’t you?"
> 
> (wishbone - richard siken) 
> 
> trigger warning for past suicide attempt.

They get married in the summer.

 

Of course they do. Pariston hates the excessive heat and the sweat running down his temples reminds him of home and he hates being reminded of home, but Ging says he refuses to wait in a line in the cold just to sign a bunch of papers. 

So, summer it is.

Pariston is wearing a button-up shirt and black trousers but he left the tie and the suit at home. Ging is wearing a comfortable t-shirt and tiny shorts and old sneakers. He bought a can of soda on the way here, and he drinks it through a straw. 

"Want a sip?" Ging offers. 

"Yeah, thanks."

The metal is cold against the palm of his hand, and he appreciates the sweetness and the bubbles as he sips up from the straw. He and Ging don't usually get two spoons or two forks or two straws anymore when they're going to share food and drinks - Ging's logic is that they've stuck their tongues down each other's throats often enough for it to be pointless by now. 

He hands the can back to Ging. Ging finishes it up and plays with the straw after he's done.

Pariston can't stop staring at his legs.

It takes a while, but it's quicker than Pariston expected. The place they're at is dull and uninteresting, so they pass the time by playing stupid games while they wait. 

Obviously, they won't have a ceremony. Pariston isn't even sure they're going to tell anyone. They might just let people find out by themselves. He will love being at the first Zodiacs meeting after one of them finds out Pariston Hill and Ging Freeccs got married. To each other. 

He does want a ring, though. For that exact purpose. And because he likes the idea of staking some sort of claim in a creature so incredibly hard to catch as Ging.

At this point, they're the next up to get into the cramped office and sign the papers, and Ging has grown bored of their games, so he asks, "What are you thinking about?"

"Wedding rings," Pariston says. "You."

"Hmmm." Ging turns to stand in front of Pariston and looks up at him, raises his hand to thread his fingers through his golden, soft hair. “Can’t believe I’m getting married,” he says, head slightly tilted to the side in that lovely way he does when he’s trying to figure something out. He often does it when he’s with Pariston. 

Pariston is distracted by Ging's fingertips tracing down his temple and the side of his face so it takes him a second to answer. 

“Having second thoughts, sweetheart?”

Ging scoffs and pulls at his hair as punishment. “I never have second thoughts.”

“Never?”

“No.” 

Pariston doesn’t want to say that he thinks that’s probably because Ging never cared about anything enough to mourn its loss or wish he had done anything differently in order to change the resulting occurrences. He doesn't want to say that marriage is  _ different _ , marriage forces you to care. So, he reaches up and takes Ging's hand out of his hair and intertwines their fingers together. Best to minimize the pain while he can. “No regrets either?”

“Nope. Besides, the idea was mine in the first place.”

"So we're going to grow old together? Have kids? Buy a little place on the suburbs?"

"Awfully optimistic of you to think either of us will grow old at all."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm going to die at some point soon. Especially if I manage to reach the Dark Continent, which I intend to do."

"And me?"

Ging stares at him. "If you don't die with me, you know perfectly well how you'll end up."

Pariston looks up at the ceiling, smiles idly. He remembers the one time he texted Ging goodbye - the one person in the world he bothered sending a suicide note to, the one person who would maybe think about missing him when he was gone. He remembers being pulled into someone's familiar, strong arms, a trembling hand covering the gaping wound in his neck, where he had tried - and failed, just by a few centimeters - to slash his jugular vein open. He remembers laughing, the blood leaving his body in sick bursts timed to his weakened heartbeat. 

He remembers waking up in a hospital, Ging covered in blood napping on the chair beside the bed. 

They never talked about that. They probably never will.  

Absentmindedly, he touches the scar left on his throat with the tip of his finger. “I'm better now."

"I'm sure you are. Poster child for mental stability.”

Pariston doesn't know how to answer to that, so he doesn't. There's a moment of silence before Ging speaks up again. “And we're  _ not _ having kids."

"Aren't you going to tell your son he's getting another dad?"

"He already has one shitty father, there's no need to introduce him to his other one."

"What about the little house on the suburbs? White picket fence, morning jogs?”

"I'll accept a beach house."

"There's mine. We didn't bother doing a pre-nup, so it's ours now."

Ging's brown eyes shine in pure delight. He loves the beach house, loves the sea, loves Paris. "Nice."

-

"What now?" Ging asks as they step out of the civil registry office, as if Pariston has any more knowledge about married life than he does. 

What Pariston knows about marriage narrows down to empty, dark houses too big for a child to live in, screaming arguments, cheating and crying and bad, bad touches and lots, lots of pain. 

And now, Ging. For all of 20 minutes so far. 

"Now I'm starving," Pariston says. "Do you want burgers?"

"Sure. I know this great place downtown."

They go get burgers. 

The air-conditioner is blasting inside the burger place, and it's a very welcome relief from the unforgiving heat outside. While they wait in line, Ging stands in front of Pariston, close enough that their breaths would mingle together if not for their height difference, and undoes the first three buttons of his shirt. "It's too hot to keep it buttoned up the whole way," he says while straightening his collar as well. "And you look better like this."

After he's done with that, he plays with the button that's closest to Pariston's throat.  

"You're touch-starved today," Pariston mentions, if only to see the inevitable little scowl that comment will get him. 

"Sue me for wanting to be close to my  _ husband _ , you little shit."

Pariston chuckles and steps closer to hold him, props his chin up on the top of his head. "That word. Still sounds strange."

"We'll get used to it at some point."

"It'll sound realer when we get the rings, I think."

They get interrupted for a moment so they can place their orders and then find a table for two. It's not crowded - the weather is hot enough that it's chasing people off the streets. They sit facing each other, and for the first time in years, probably for the first time ever since they met, there's no confrontation in the way their gazes cross. 

There's curiosity.

Pariston feels his heartbeat picking up a notch, because there's no other moment in which Ging looks more beautiful than when he's curious and fascinated about something. 

He reaches forward, takes Ging's hand in his own, traces the empty space on his ring finger. 

"You're dead-set in getting those rings, aren't you?" Ging says and takes a sip of his drink. 

Pariston shrugs. "Indulge me in just this much, will you? I'll pay for them myself."

"Which makes no sense, since I was the one to propose-"

"It barely counts as a proposal."

"-and makes even less difference, since you're richer than God."

"You're as rich as I am, and it's supposed to be symbolic. Besides..."

Ging raises an eyebrow. "Besides?"

Pariston leans forward. " _ Please _ imagine Cheadle's face when she sees the two of us wearing wedding rings. That's all I ask for."

It's childish and petty. Ging looks up at the ceiling for a moment, picturing the scene in his mind, and what he sees makes him laugh. He gets up to pick up their orders, and when he comes back, he’s still smiling.

“I see your point. Okay." 

Pariston only eats half of his burger, nibbles on some fries, and drinks all the soda, and watches Ging as he eats. 

They leave to buy the rings, and Ging clings to Pariston's arm because he loves the attention. They get simple, golden bands that look exactly like each other. 

Ging turns his this way and that, analyzing it with wide eyes as if it's a mysterious, unknown artifact. "I thought you'd want something more..."

Pariston smiles. "Gaudy?"

"I mean, you do wear pink, striped three-piece suits. These just seem too simple for you."

Pariston slides his ring on his finger. It feels nice. Safe. Like laying on a familiar bed under a heavy blanket. "You'd never wear something like that. Besides, I like it just fine like this."

Ging stares at his ring some more, touches it against his lips, presses just the tip of his tongue on the smooth surface. 

"You're a strange creature, you know that?" Pariston says. 

Ging puts it on his finger and lifts his hand, looks at the way the gold reflects the harsh sunlight. "It's almost the same color as your hair," he comments. 

"How does it feel?"

"Not as weird as I thought it'd feel." he reaches and grabs Pariston's left hand, analyzes the pair of rings together. "It's kind of nice. I like it."

 

-

 

Pariston sits up on what's become their bed, hugs his knees close to his chest, stares out the window. “I didn’t sleep well.”

The sun has just risen on the other side of the glass. Pariston needs -  _ needs _ \- to have a bedroom with windows. Closed-off bedrooms with solid walls are far too reminiscent of his childhood. 

Ging sits down next to him and strokes his golden, soft hair. When Pariston wakes up, he always smells like expensive cologne and panic. Panic has a very distinct scent to it, and sometimes it spreads to every inch of Pariston's skin, every thread of his hair. 

It's like sadness. Loneliness. Boredom.

Love.

"Have you ever?" Ging asks. Pariston is leaning into his touch.

"Mm?"

"Have you ever slept well?"  _ in your life?  _

Pariston closes his eyes, thinks about it. "I don't know. I don't remember."

He sounds like he's on the verge of tears, like he's about to break down crying if he still knew how to. He looks exhausted.  

Ging shifts closer to him and presses a kiss to his cheek. “Let's go to the kitchen. I'll make you something to eat, we can work a bit and I'll nap with you.”  

“Okay. Just-” Pariston blinks hard, trying to chase the sleep off his eyes. “Five minutes.”

“What?”

“Five minutes and I'll get up.” 

Ging kisses his cheek again. His hand is cradling Pariston's face absent-mindedly, his thumb tracing invisible, soothing circles. His wedding ring feels nice and cold against the soft skin of Pariston's cheek. "Okay. I'll be in the bath. Come find me."

Pariston nods, and Ging leaves him. A few moments later, there's the sound of running water. 

Pariston stretches his legs in front of himself again, rubs them together. He always shaves them clean, every two weeks, and the feeling is nice. 

He's a far more tactile creature than he likes to admit to himself. 

He plays with the wide collar of his silk pajama shirt, snaps the elastic band of the shorts against his waist. He glances at the other side of the bed, touches it with his palm - it still feels warm, and comforting, from Ging's body heat. 

Ging sleeps naked. He sleeps well and a lot, because he gets bored, because his depression makes him sleepy while Pariston's psychosis makes him an insomniac. Even when he gets nightmares, he never wakes up from them. He tosses and turns and says things, but he never startles awake, no matter how much Pariston pushes at his shoulder and calls his name. 

Pariston's insomnia is efficient and scheduled. He has numerous nightmares throughout the night, and he wakes up at the end of every single one of them, as if his mind makes it a point to see him through every terrifying, nonsensical plot and every recreation of a childhood memory, only to then startle him awake, so he can stare at the ceiling and cry and feel alone in the dark. 

He's very tired. He always is. 

At least he's not alone anymore. 

Ging starts singing in the bathroom. He has a beautiful singing voice. Unlike Pariston's, which is pretty and pleasant because it was trained to be, Ging's is natural and just on the right side of rough and it sounds nice to the ears.

Pariston takes off his silk pajamas and walks his way to their bathroom. When he arrives, Ging lays back on the tub and opens his arms, and Pariston steps into the water and maneuvers so he can get comfortable in them, his back to Ging's strong chest. 

The arms wrap around him. He relaxes, closes his eyes and lets himself be held. 

"What do you have to do today?"

"Paperwork," Pariston answers, trailing the tip of his fingers over the surface of the warm water. He's comfortable and the warmth of Ging's body against his feels like love. And there's something very interesting in seeing Ging with nothing on except for his golden wedding ring. 

“You always have paperwork.”

“Netero doesn’t do them so I have to.”

"Isaac is a fucking asshole."

Pariston shrugs. "At least he's not boring."

"Yeah, I suppose," Ging says. He reaches up for the bottles of shampoo and conditioner and starts making soft white foam in both his and Pariston's hair. It makes the bathroom smell like coconuts and vanilla. "He's getting old, though."

"What makes you say that?"

"He's letting you get away with too much. I know of your schemes in the Association."

Pariston's lips drag in a mean smirk. "You don't know about all of them."

"That's my point." Ging says, and he sounds proud, in a very twisted way. He fills up a small plastic bucket with water. "Close your eyes."

Pariston does. In the darkness behind his eyelids, water falls over his head and the back of his neck. 

 

-

 

Ging frowns at all the types of vegetables. "I hate buying groceries."

Pariston leans forward, crossing his arms on top of the handle of the shopping cart. It's an old shopping cart, and the little wheels screech a lot. "Can't be helped. You were the one who said you wanted to spend more time at the beach house."

"You could've come by yourself," Ging grumbles. 

"I'm not nearly that nice."

It's very late, sometime between 1am and 4am. If Pariston concentrates, he can see sharks swimming around on the yogurts section. 

"Do you ever see whales?" he asks, because he doesn't have the most solid hold on his mind or on reality right now. There's a neon blue light coming from somewhere, and a light cold breeze raises goosebumps on his arms. The wheels whine loudly as he pushes the cart forward. 

Ging turns his head lazily. "Hm?"

"Whales."

It makes absolutely no sense, but Ging looks around the aisles and his brown eyes shine a little. "Mm. Sometimes. Mostly blue whales."

Pariston looks at him, and almost hates how badly he loves him.

"You're the only person in the world who understands me."

Ging smiles, and his smile looks feverish and a bit on the wrong side of maniac. It's captivating. "Not the only one. The whales understand you too." 

Pariston reaches to grab two boxes of chocolate for them. "I used to be very scared of the ocean when I was little."

"What changed?"

"Nothing. I'm still scared. But now I love it a lot too."

Ging moves to stand in front of him. They look at each other - the height difference makes Ging tilt his chin up in order to stare into Pariston's brown eyes. 

He tilts his head to the side. "I love you, Paris."

Pariston threads his long, pianist fingers through Ging's soft hair, pushes it back from his forehead. "I love you too, Ging."

A neon blue shark swims around them.

 

-

 

Kite knocks on their door. 

The sun is setting and Pariston feels his aura in the building before he even gets up from his desk chair and leaves his office to open for him. Kite has a very specific, easily identifiable nen, somewhere between scared child cowering in the corner and traumatized fighter with zero regard for his own safety. It's obvious why Ging likes him.

Pariston is starting to wonder if Ging has a type. Pretty, young boys with daddy issues and traumatizing pasts. 

He opens the door, gives Kite a brilliant smile. "Hello."

Kite frowns at him immediately, hides more behind the shadow of his hat. "Hey.”

“Fancy having you here, beautiful.”

“Where's Ging?"

Kite doesn't like Pariston. The feeling is absolutely mutual. 

"Went out to get coffee." Pariston eyes him up and down, a curious, vacant, glazed-over look in his eyes. He looks like he's drugged. He's probably just tired. Kite remembers that much from when the three of them shared an apartment - Pariston is always exhausted. "Should I call him and tell him to buy more?"

Kite shakes his head, looks down at his hands. "It's okay."

This poor kid, Pariston thinks. Poor baby. Ging adopted him and forgot to be nice. "Well, come in, honey. You can wait for him inside."

"Okay."

Kite takes off his shoes and enters their living room. Pariston closes the door behind them and watches as Kite sits down in one of the couches. 

"I heard you two got married."

Pariston blinks and traces his wedding ring with his thumb. "Is that why you came?"

Kite raises his head and stares at him, his dark shadowed eyes searching for something. "Why did it have to be you?"

Pariston raises his hand and touches the purple bruise left behind on his throat by Ging's teeth the night before. "Maybe I'm a better fuck than you," he says, the cruelty inside his blood seeping through on the words. The bruise tingles painfully when he touches it. 

Kite snarls. He's so much like a wild animal sometimes. Maybe that's why he doesn't like Pariston; he can smell the wickedness hiding under his plastic smiles. 

Pariston sits on the arm of the couch and nibbles on a grilled cheese sandwich. "Ask him if you want to know. It was his idea."

"God. I can't believe you two."

The door opens suddenly, and Ging stares at them, two large cups of coffee in both his hands. 

"Paris, stop being mean to Kite," he says while handing him one of the cups. 

Pariston smiles over the plastic black lid. "I wasn't."

Ging turns to Kite then. "Yo."

“Hey. I heard you got married.”

“Yep.”

“You never told me.”

“Didn't see the point.”

Pariston isn't sure, but he thinks it's been years since they last saw each other. He takes a sip of his coffee;  _ and I'm the mean one. _

"Are you staying in town?" Ging asks, slightly gentler than before, sitting down next to Kite on the couch. 

"Yes. I have some research - need to check some sources."

Pariston reaches to stroke Kite's long, pretty hair. "We're leaving for the beach tomorrow, but you can stay the night if you want." 

Kite closes his eyes, leans into his touch. "Okay."

Pariston smiles down at him. "You're a sweetheart."

  
"You're psychotic."

Pariston keeps smiling.

Ging gets up and starts fiddling with the television. "C'mon, we can watch one of those horror movies Kite likes."

Pariston lets Kite go and walks to the kitchen to make popcorn for the three of them. The popping sounds are loud, so he can't hear the conversation between the other two in the living room, but he can feel the sting of Ging's aura getting sharper in that way it does when he's frustrated, and Kite's already melancholic nen feels even darker. They're arguing. Pariston hums a song and continues making popcorn. 

When he returns, they seem to be in decent terms again. He sits down on the couch, Ging by his right and Kite to his left. 

The movie is terrifying. Pariston doesn't mind - he likes disturbing experiences. It gives his brain an excuse to indulge in fucked-up thoughts. He leans on Ging's side, props his head up on his shoulder and watches as an archivist gets murdered with a hammer. He imagines his father is the archivist and he's the killer. It brings a manic smile to his face. 

About halfway into the movie, Kite shifts on the couch and moves closer to Pariston. Pariston wraps an arm around his shoulder and snuggles up to him, presses a kiss to the top of his head. His hair smells like chocolate-scented shampoo. 

Kite is very, very scared. 

"It's okay, kid," Pariston whispers. "I've got you."

At the end of the film, Kite falls asleep like that, clinging to Pariston's arm.

"You're still doing that thing," Ging says. 

"What thing?" Pariston asks.

"That smile. Like you want to kill someone."

"I do."

"Isn't your father already dead?"

"I don't know. Is he?"

"You're the worst person to watch horror movies with."

Pariston watches as Ging wraps an arm around Kite's shoulders and another one under his knees and lifts him up to carry him to the bedroom. "He's so much like you sometimes," he comments. 

"Like what?"

"Starved for affection."

Ging scoffs. He doesn't look like he's making any efforts to hold Kite in his arms. "Look who's talking, golden child. You cry in your sleep."

"You're wrong."

"Am I?"

"I don't even sleep."

They stare at each other and laugh, as quietly as possible so as to not wake Kite up.   
  



	2. story received, story included

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Pariston steals a glance at him. 'You want to ask, don't you?'
> 
> Ging shrugs. He does. He is morbidly curious about the world like that."
> 
> Pariston and Ging tell each other stories. 
> 
> TW: past suicide attempt, mentions of eating disorder and rape, implied violence, sexual content

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you. You and all the other secret agents carooming underneath the radar, sending your documents back to Mission Control—which is me, I guess, because I have a permanent address.   
>  I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included."
> 
> (the long and short story of it - richard siken)

Ging remembers the hospital. He remembers the white walls, the stone-faced nurses the cold doctors. He remembers how they all kept offering for him to go home and shower and get the blood stains out of his clothes and face and hands - Paris was out of trouble now, they said, it wouldn't hurt for him to change into something clean and maybe pick up some stuff if he was going to spend the night. He remembers how they all sounded like they were on a distant, long-forgotten shore while he was underwater in the abyssal zones. He remembers not feeling anything in particular, just staring at the coffee machine and the clock reading 4 am and the cooling, sticky blood on his hands and remembering just exactly how the gaping wound on a throat feels like when it's pulsing to the same rhythm as a heartbeat.

Everything else is blurry. He doesn’t remember how Paris managed to leave the hospital and avoid going straight to a mental facility. He doesn't remember talking to anyone, doesn't remember the moment in which he saw blood-stained water going down a drain. 

His strongest memories, the only ones that are left from those feverish, insane days, are rushing to Paris’ awfully cold and beautiful penthouse and holding his palm pressed tightly to his throat, blood pulsing and oozing between his trembling fingers while Paris looked at him with that psychotic smile that he will never in his entire life be able to forget, and then waking up from a restless night of sleep in a hospital room, Paris staring at him with big vacant eyes and lily white bandages around his neck.

The eyes.

He remembers the eyes.

They were the first thing Ging ever paid attention to in Paris, back when they were two brats with sharp teeth and sharper tongues. His empty, ferocious brown eyes, that his plastic smiles could never quite reach. The sick depth of honesty behind them, waves and pulses of hatred so pure in its existence that could only result from a very old gathering of resentments, of unforgivable memories. Most of all, the longing. Paris looked at the world as if he wanted to eat it whole, split it apart between his teeth. He  _ yearned _ for things as much as he despised them.

From the start, Paris looked at Ging as if he had never wanted anything more in his life. 

Not like Kite, who stole glances at Ging as if he was everything that had ever mattered to him, as if the sheer fact of his existence was both a miracle and a blessing. Paris looked at him as if he was so fascinated by Ging he wanted to destroy him or be destroyed by him. 

In that white, bright white hospital room, Paris' eyes were glazed over, like shattered glass.

“You're awake,” he said, his voice vacant of all possible feeling. 

Ging blinked, thought about taking his hand, didn't. “Yes.”

Paris tilted his head in a weirdly inhuman way, some of his golden bangs shifting to cover one of his eyes. It had to hurt the wound on his neck; he didn't show any sign of discomfort. “You're here.”

Ging forced himself not to look away from Paris’ empty gaze. “So are you.”

Paris didn't move for a moment. He stayed in that eerie, disconcerting position for just a beat too long to bear any resemblance to something an ordinary person would do, and then he moved, his lips quirked, and he laughed. Broken and rough, like hysterical sobs. It was the most psychotic, heartbreaking sound Ging had ever heard in his life.

He remembers that laughter echoing in the white walls of the hospital.

-

"You know, I can drive too. You must be tired."

Pariston puts on that heavily affected look of surprise on his face that irritates Ging to no end. "Do I look tired?"

"You always look half-dead."

"Why are you offering?"

"Because you haven't asked. I am your husband, you know. You can ask me these things."

Pariston waves in a dismissive gesture. "It's okay. I like driving."

"Why do you like driving so much?"

Pariston's hands discreetly tighten around the steering wheel. "I like getting away from places."

"What do you mean?"

"I spent years thinking I would never be able to leave that-" and in here he takes a sharp breath, his voice coming out snarled and impossibly hateful, bathed in a deep, unhinged resentment Ging only ever rarely sees him display, " _ godforsaken  _ town." another breath, much calmer; the light in his eyes is subdued, and he's once again back to his carefully curated persona. "I like knowing I can leave. Even if not in the absurdly pathological way you do."

Ging stays quiet. Pariston never talks about his childhood. Ging knows he hates his father to a degree that feels like the strongest manifestation that a human emotion can take; it’s almost beautiful to see, in an analytical way. Makes him look more human.

Pariston steals a glance at him. “You want to ask, don't you?”

Ging shrugs. He does. He is morbidly curious about the world like that.

"I am your husband, you know," he smirks a little, playful. Ging can see a sliver of his white teeth between his slightly parted lips. "You can ask me these things."

Ging hums and fidgets with the car stereo. "How do I know you won't lie to me?"

"Try me."

Ging silently raises an eyebrow. Pariston smirks more and continues. "Okay. How about this: you ask me a question, I'll give you an answer. You figure out if I'm lying or not."

"Okay. I'm bored anyway."

"Go on, then. Allow me to entertain you with childhood tales."

The road rushes beside the car windows like something out of a fever dream.

"Where were you born?"

"Small town you probably never heard of. As suburban as possible, white picket fences and all. You would hate it so much you'd want to set it on fire."

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Set it on fire?"

Pariston laughs. It's sick. "No. But I did my best."

"Do you have siblings?"

"No. Golden, perfect only child."

"Well, that explains a lot."

“It does, but not as much as you might expect.”

Ging tsks. “Father and mother?”

“What do you think?”

Ging looks at him carefully. Narrows his eyes. “Yes. Your mom was weak, though. It'd have been the same if she weren't there.”

Pariston smiles, lowers his head. “Very well. How can you tell?’

“There's a difference between being desperate for paternal and maternal affections. You're desperate for both. Like Kite, but… different. You didn't lose anyone.”

Pariston's upper lip curves in distaste. “Kite hates my guts.”

“No, he doesn't. He's just jealous.”

“Why, because he has a gag reflex and I don't?”

Ging turns to stare at him. The implications of that sentence are far more than clear enough for him to take them as the subtle offense they were meant to be. He is confused as to which side of the mental image it conveyed makes him feel more betrayed. 

“He wants you to have his children," Paris says, mean and venomous, his nice little facade shattered for a moment. "You know that, right?”

Ging shrugs, the careless movement throwing out Kite's awfully codependent feelings for him. “Wouldn't be the first. Besides, I wasn't the one who cuddled the nightmares out of him last night. Chill, I’m not gonna cheat on you. I honor my promises.” 

Pariston unconsciously traces his wedding ring with his thumb and doesn’t answer, but the hard glint in his eyes says  _ you better. _

“Touchy subject?”

Pariston doesn’t say anything, which is a response in and of itself.

Ging switches topics. There's a very delicate distinction between confronting Pariston and outright antagonizing him, and he wants to keep this conversation going now that the Pandora box of traumas has been slightly opened. "And college?"

"What about it?"

"How was it? What did you major on?"

Pariston hums thoughtfully, tilts his head a bit to the side. "Went to med school for a year, then went to another college for politics and law, then after I graduated I did astrophysics while working on my masters. I've been thinking about doing a doctorate next year."

"Why astrophysics?"

"Just for the hell of it. I was bored. And you?"

Ging pulls his legs up and hugs his knees. "No formal education."

"So you're just that smart?"

"I guess you could say so."

Pariston lets out an evil chuckle. "This is why people hate us."

Ging shrugs again. "Let them. So, how did your father die?”

“Killed himself.”

“Did he?”

“ _ Technically _ , yes.”

"Technically?"

Pariston throws a mysterious little smile at him. "Do you want me to tell you?"

There's a blatant challenge in the question, teasing Ging to find an answer that can't be found anywhere. "I'll find out."

After that, Ging grows slightly bored of their little game and entertains his fickle mind by looking out the window and memorizing the lyrics to the unfamiliar songs that play on the stereo. Being handed answers like that isn't half as fun as figuring them out himself. Besides, "I have the feeling you didn't lie," he accuses. 

Pariston shifts gears. "I didn't."

"Why not?"

"I've just been meaning to tell that story, I guess."

-

“Have you eaten at all today?”

Pariston smiles sweetly from his spot on the couch. It's dragged out and lazy and sick, and says absolutely nothing to attempt denial of the obvious. 

It's late at night, one of those large, oceanic evenings Ging is so fond of when they spend time at Paris' - their - beach house. He feels the most at peace when he can smell the sea salt and see all the stars in the sky.

Now, however, his focus is settled upon the way Pariston licks his lips. His fingers twitch where they grab at the cover of the novel he's currently reading.

He looks weak. It makes Ging's ribs tighten around his heart with irritation. 

"Why don't you eat?" he asks, voice slightly strained. 

Paris lazily lifts his glance and eyes him. His movements are sticky slow, calculated and deliberate. "Why do you overwork yourself?"

Stalemate. 

"Is this about your father?"

Paris shuts his book close and taps at the cover. "Is this about your son?"

Ging closes his eyes and turns away. "Fine."

He leaves for the kitchen to get another glass of the red wine they have been consuming throughout this trip. His wedding ring clinks against the thick glass of the dark bottle.

"Will you ever tell me about it?" Paris calls out from the living room. The strong ocean wind outside the house drowns out his voice a bit. 

Ging comes back with a glass in between his fingers. "I'll tell you right now if you want to know so bad."

Pariston's eerily dark eyes shine with devilish curiosity. 

Ging sits down next to him, takes a sip of his wine. This story is closed off in a dark part of his mind, so dark he barely has access to it. "There's not much to tell. Some guy thought he could get me to shut up if he had his way with me. He was wrong. Either way, I only found out one month or so in."

Pariston is still staring at him. Ging fights back instinctive shivers. "You look like a psycho right now," he complains. 

Pariston hums. He's thinking about murder but he is still paying attention in the story. "I am a psycho. What was his name?"

"Fuck knows. I barely remember his face." a long, long sip of the wine. Paris watches Ging's throat as it works over the swallow. "Gon was a strong baby. The pregnancy was hell. I finished up Greed Island and handed him over to Mito after two years. And now, here we are."

"Do you miss Gon?"

Ging shrugs, or tries to. The corners of his lips are too weighed down by an unnamed, old emotion, his eyes narrowed and staring out at the ocean just outside their window. "Does it matter? He's not here."

Pariston doesn't know how to answer to that. Tentatively, he reaches out and places his hand on top of Ging's. He doesn't know how affection works, or tenderness, but he tries. 

"Eat something before bed, okay?" Ging says, his voice sounding the most exhausted Paris has ever heard it. 

He doesn't have the strength to deny him. "Okay."

-

When Ging wakes up the next morning, Pariston has already left to take care of something or other in the town closest to the beach. He drags himself out of a bed that's quickly losing its warmth, and on top of the kitchen counter, he finds Pariston's personal computer and a small pendrive beside it. He recognizes it as the one kept in the breast pocket of his tacky suits at all moments of the day, and then on the bedside table at night, given nearly as much care as his Hunter license. 

_ Since you asked _ , a little note reads, in Pariston's pretty, perfect handwriting. The sun streaming from the windows makes the glitter pink gel pen he used glint softly. 

There are no instructions whatsoever regarding how to use any of the gadgets. Ging finds himself smirking at the loading screen. 

It takes him a while to find out the password merely to open the computer at all. He uses the keys in the keyboard as his guides, searches for the most used letters, racks his brain for all the possible interpretations for the vague tip the system offers him when he types the wrong password three times. It's intellectual, gruesome work, the type he's not used to given his specialty in the Hunter world - and yet, exciting nonetheless, precisely because of how entirely out of his depth he is, as he finds himself analyzing everything he knows about his husband, all the little quirks and facts that may give him a hint as to what he's looking for. 

When he does find the password, nearly twenty minutes later, the thrill that goes through his spine is enough to get him to punch the air and yelp like an excited kid. 

_ I'm not bored, _ he notices as he happily puts the thin, silver pen drive on the USB port.  _ I'm not bored at all. _

None of the files in the pen drive have names. Just plain blue files, no labels or distinctions between the three of them, all of which require new passwords of their own to be opened and viewed. 

He picks the one most to his left, just because he knows that's Pariston's usual choice when he has to pick between left and right.  

This second password is easier, now that he knows what he’s looking for. Hunters are slippery and hard to catch by nature, unattached to their past and longtime memories, but people are just people in the end, and Pariston hasn't gotten rid of all information about his childhood and adolescence. Considering how thorough and vicious he is about everything, Ging knows it would be an insult to imagine it was by some accident or mistake.

He finds a small article from a local newspaper from almost 10 years before, the only one he's been able to discover after almost forty minutes of frenetic searching all over the internet and the Hunter website. It's short and badly written, about a strange death in an otherwise quiet, calm town. He can see Pariston's evil hands and cruel mind and childish rage all over the descriptions and the few pictures. It's his secret trophy, the gold medal he gave himself. 

He kisses his wedding ring in excitement and an instinctive, twisted version of pride. 

He knows some details already - the death, the setting, everyone's reactions. All he needs is the date. 

It opens the file for him with a satisfying little sound. He punches the air again. 

The video is grainy, the image quality bad. There are Paris and an unnamed person, staring at each other, a metal table between them. They sit in a shady room, suspicious and void of all furniture. Paris is younger here, his jaw less sharp, his hair a bit longer. He doesn't wear a suit, but his buttoned-up shirt is perfectly pressed and his trousers neatly ironed. 

Ging is enraptured, his heart pounding with anticipation. He leans forward, elbows bracing against the kitchen table. 

Pariston is talking, his pretty pink lips moving. Ging can't figure out what he's saying, but his posture and the way he carries himself say a lot. He's confident, relaxed, his head tilted up to expose his neck, as if he knows for sure no harm could ever come to him. A lovely smug smirk curves the corners of his mouth. 

All of a sudden, the unnamed person goes rigid, as if someone has pulled up a string twined around their spine. They bend forward and slam their head against the corner of the metal table. They do it again, and again, vicious in the unflinching repetition of such a harmful action, blood pooling on the ground from the growing wound on their forehead, the sheer strength of the hits pushing the table backward. Paris calmly braces a foot in front of one of its legs so it will stop moving. 

At some point, they die. There's blood everywhere, in the table, the walls, the floor. Paris gets up from his chair, fixes his cuffs and makes an elegant cutting motion with his hand for someone outside the room. Just before the recording ends, he stares directly at the camera, his brown eyes looking up. He looks insane in his flawless confidence. 

Ging wants to kiss him. Wants to devour him whole. Wants to marry him again, and in a blinding moment of irrationality, places his hand over his stomach and thinks about an unnamed child with his hair and Pariston's eyes. 

As soon as the front door opens, Ging pushes his chair back to grab his husband by the back of his neck the moment he so much as steps inside the house; Pariston responds to his fierce kiss instinctively, as if it's as natural to him to bite Ging’s lower lip viciously enough to draw blood as it is to step off his shoes.

It's a deep kiss, filthy and intimate, Pariston's expert hands sliding down to grasp at Ging's hips and pull him closer. Ging wraps an arm around Paris’ neck, and, with the other, reaches behind the two of them to slam the door close. 

No witnesses for this one. Their own perfect crime scene.

There has never been any sort of slow starts when it comes to what they have. Pariston doesn't know how to kiss without tongue, and Ging doesn't know how to be held without arching his back and standing on his tiptoes for more. There's a whole new depth to this one, however, as Ging clings to him and digs his short fingernails into his nape as if he wants to taste all of the blood Pariston has ever drawn forward, as if he can feel the darkness that stains his very core by sheer strength of his kisses.

_ I'm back _ , Pariston thinks.  _ Welcome home _ , Ging silently answers.

“I take it you saw the video, then?” Paris asks, his pink lips trailing down Ging’s face to press tiny bites against the fragile skin covering his pulse point. He sounds hungry, and delighted.

Ging shivers. “Show me. Use it in me.” his voice comes out breathy and excited and aroused. He’s  _ curious  _ and he  _ wants. _

Paris shakes his head, pulls Ging sharply closer to himself, his twitching fingers telling on just how deep his disturbing possessiveness goes. “No. You don't deserve it. I like you better like this.”

Ging starts walking backward, leading the two of them to the bedroom they now share and call theirs. “Have me, then. Fuck me.”

Pariston smiles, the cutting-edge corners of his lips pulling up. Ging can almost see the blood trailing down from between his perfect white teeth. When they fall back on the mattress, they cling to each other fiercely, and Ging feels his own body relaxing as he gives up control and allows Paris to mold his curves and edges to his desire. Now that he knows what those hands can do, now that he knows just how deep the cruel power inside those eerie, dark eyes goes, and the feeling of endgame, of a challenge he wouldn't break away from even if he wanted to, there’s nothing else worth his attention more than this.

Pariston fucks him deep, and hard, nearly violent in his roughness. His hips snap forward trying to stake a claim on Ging by force alone. 

“Does it hurt?” he asks, mean smile pressed right on the dip on top of Ging's collarbone.

“ _ Yes _ ,” Ging moans out, the hissing end of that single word carrying out all the pleasure he can't encompass in speech.

“Good.”

Ging can barely register what's going on outside of their small, conjoined circle of depravity, his entire perception narrowed down to feeling his husband so deep inside of him, reaching all the way in his heart and his body, the cold of his wedding ring firm against the flushed skin of Ging's thigh.

“One day,” Paris whispers, mouth very close to his ear, tongue curling around the edges of his personal brand of psychosis he can never fully hide away when they're like this, “I'll fuck another child into you and you'll never belong to anyone else but me.”

Ging feels a single, overwhelmed tear drip down the side of his cheekbone.  He  _ wants,  _ wants whatever Paris will give him, whatever he can take for himself. “I’ll let you.” 

A sharp, painful bite drags at his collarbone. A thumb touches the wet trail his teardrop left behind. “You'll  _ ask _ me, and I'll give you.”

Ging's body is selfish in the way it arches back and curves around its own pleasure, in how his fingernails carve deep trails of red in the fair skin of Paris’ back. It's demanding and cruel and beautiful, and Pariston loves every single inch of it.

If they were kinder people, he would shower Ging in kisses and caresses. As they are, with the fresh memory of a bloodied skull and all the possibilities of creativity unbound by any sort of rules, he bites and scratches and pulls, his hips keep moving, and Ging's expression opens up to a desperate delight and he's the most gorgeous thing Paris has ever seen.

Paris has captured the rare bird, has found the diamond, pried open the shell to find the pearl, and it's underneath him, on his bed, tearing up for his cock. The power rush going through his veins makes him shiver all the way down to the base of his spine.

It's nearly too much, too good. He has no idea what he can do when he feels like this.

  
_ I hope you destroy me _ , he thinks just before his mind whites out.  _ I hope we destroy each other. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im sorry it took so long hhhhh my hAND


	3. dead man at our feet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "'It's okay,” Paris breathes on his ear, delights in feeling the resulting shivers. His husband is so responsive. 'It's just me.'
> 
> Ging arches back against him, his body moving beautifully in pure instinct, a sleepy smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 'It's never 'just you', Paris.'"
> 
> in which things start to get complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Don’t you see, it’s like  
> I’ve swallowed your house keys, and it feels so natural, like the bullet was already there,  
> like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.  
> Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground  
> like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands?  
> If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.  
> Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home now?  
> There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet  
> staring up at us like we’re something interesting."
> 
> (wishbone - richard siken)

Ging proposed on a bright summer day.

Pariston knows that he wouldn’t have if it were a winter morning. He is fickle like that.

If the weather had been a little colder than expected for that time of the year, if Ging hadn't woken up to bright blue skies and a tall glass of soda with ice, if Pariston hadn't decided to take that day off from his ever-present, never-ending duties to enjoy the simple pleasures of lazying around and playing old video games with Ging - he remembers waking up and staring at the ceiling and thinking, _Ging has been in town for two weeks, he won't be for much longer, work can wait a few more days -_ if any of those small variables had occurred in just a slightly different way, Ging would've left the following month, and Pariston would've gone back to his office and his empty penthouse and waiting for something that would never come to save him.

As it was, however, they were racing each other in tiny pixelated Mario Kart cars, pushing at each other and yelling like two children who got lost on their way home.

Ging won, because Ging wins at everything he can get his hands on, and Pariston relaxed back against the plush cushions.

"I won," Ging said happily, doing a little dance.

"You did," Pariston smiled. He loved seeing Ging like this, loved having him over at his house and watching as he laid upside down on the couch and laughed while killing fictional monsters on Pariston's gigantic plasma TV. "Do you want to play one more time?"

"Yes. I also want more soda."

Pariston got up and stretched. He had yet to exchange his silk camisole for something more decent - he and Ging had showered together immediately after waking up, but he hadn't found the strength to go put on his usual attire of suit and tie, and besides, it was just hard to ignore Ging pulling at his hand and excitedly asking him to turn on the TV so he could plug in the console and they could play together.

He didn't miss the way Ging's lazy stare switched from the bright colors on the screen to shameless appreciation of how the baby pink silk fabric lifted when Pariston stretched his arms above his head.

When he came back from the kitchen, Ging was no longer lying upside down. His hair fell in chaotic waves around his face and in front of his eyes. He was shirtless and the muscles in his arms shifted under his skin as he gripped the white controller in his hands tighter.

"Hey, Paris."

"Yes?" Pariston bent down to place Ging's glass of soda in the tasteful center table and then sat next to him on the couch.

"We should get married."

Pariston drank his soda through a funny little red straw that did loops around itself. "Where is this coming from?"

The electronic music coming from the TV was happy and giddy. Mario drove around in his tiny pixelated kart. The intense sunlight was making Paris dissociate - maybe, if he tried to reach out and touch Ging, he would grasp at nothing but dust particles and loss and longing.

Ging placed the controller aside and turned to look at him properly. "You love me."

Pariston is never quite sure what _love_ means. Ging is fun, and gorgeous, and never flinches when Paris says wicked things to him. There's a dark part to Paris' mind, an awful glitch to his entire personality, and Ging is the only person in the world who has never been scared of it.

There is something inside his soul that was handmade just for Ging. Maybe it is love.

He doesn't know. He wouldn’t be able to tell for sure. But it was a good enough word.

“I do,” he answered, and he believed in what he was saying, and wasn't that more than he could say about almost everything that came out of his mouth.

"If it were up to you, you'd spend your days with me." Ging continued.

"That's also true."

"So, you're the only person in the world who doesn't bore the living soul out of me. Plus, the tax benefits are nice. It would be convenient for me to have a permanent address, and, well."

_And the sex is great and we have fun together and you understand me and maybe, just maybe, we love each other._

"Okay," Paris said.

"Okay?" Ging sounded surprised, as if he hadn't been the one to suggest it, as if he had never expected for someone to so readily agree to spend the rest of their lives with him.

"Okay, we'll do it."

"Great."

"Great." Paris grabbed his own controller again. "So, do you want to play?"

"Oh, sure."

-

“So, a manipulator?”

“Obviously.”

“I could've guessed that from your personality.”

“I suppose, yes.”

“Tell me how it works.”

Pariston reaches lazily for his phone on the bedside table, unlocks it with his heavily complicated password. “Like this,” he says, and shows him the video.

It's the most recent one in a small series, dated almost three weeks ago. Ging grabs the phone from his hands and watches attentively, his handsome face illuminated by the light from the screen, the blankets reaching up to his chin.

In the video, Pariston sits in his office chair, facing a man. The phone has been placed in an angle that makes it easy to see both their expressions. "Life is interesting like that," he says, his voice careless and neutral, twirling the cord from his desk phone around his fingers. "You work and you make efforts, only to, right at the end, be robbed of everything. You do your best, because we all do our best, and yet nothing will ever amount to anything, because no one ever remembers you and people only care about things if they can see them and touch them. And you think, well, maybe it is okay, even if nothing has any meaning, even if everything is pointless, at least you get to have some happy moments, and those should be worth it. And then you get older and you realize there are no happy moments. Do you follow?"

The man nods mechanically, as if there are invisible strings controlling the movements of his body. He sits unnaturally rigid on his chair. "I do, yes."

"Perfect." Paris smiles with some heavily twisted degree of kindness. "Then, you start to think, what is the point of all of this? What is the point of suffering? Do you think there is a point to this?"

The man's tone is robotic, emotionless, but his eyes are wide and terrified. It's like his will has been kidnapped, taken away from his hands, and he has no choice but to watch from his fleeting consciousness. "No."

Paris' own eyes go lidded with evil satisfaction, his smirk so sharp it cuts and draws blood. "I don't think so, either." he straightens his suit. "You know," he says, tongue curling around the words to make them sound almost like an afterthought,"I hear the beach is a good place to spend your vacation this time of the year."

His guest gets up immediately, the motion so quick it's startling. "Thank you for the suggestion."

The screen goes black with the end of the video. Ging's entire expression is shining with the fascination of discovery.

"So, you can basically make anyone do anything?" he asks, and he sounds breathless, moves closer to Paris. He sounds like he's swimming in the ocean and has just found a beautiful great white shark and can't help himself from touching it.

Paris takes the phone away and turns it off, drops it somewhere on his bedside table again and makes a mental note to change his password as soon as he gets out of bed. "It's not something that powerful." he wraps an arm around Ging's naked waist. "I can convince people to do bad things to themselves. Netero described it as sadistic hypnosis. I can't make anyone do something physically or biologically impossible, I can't make them do anything for their own well-being, and I can't use it to help other people. Doesn't work in non-human beings, and it functions better the more I know about the person."

Ging hums. "Well, that explains a lot." he lifts his hand to trace Paris' lower lip with his thumb. His body is warm against Paris' constantly cold skin. "Do you have to make a whole speech every time?"

"Not necessarily. I could just order them around, but the more I convince them, the more efficient it is, and the less energy I have to use. That in situations where I don't have any emotional involvement."

"What do you mean?"

"This power stemmed from - well, from when I was a kid. The whole thing about my father. You know. So, if I'm feeling angry, or something, it just - seeps out of me. And then it feeds on that, and I barely have to think about it. It just works."

Ging licks his lips thoughtfully. "And where is that man now?

"Drowned somewhere in the ocean. As of now, he's on the record as missing. I doubt they'll ever find him."

"And why do you record it?"

Paris shrugs. "For analysis purposes. Since I couldn't tell anyone about it, I had to figure out stuff by myself. It's how I found out it works better when I'm face-to-face with the other person and when we're at eye-level and when we're engaging in conversation, among other details."

Ging moves suddenly, climbs on top of Paris, their lips brushing. "That and I bet you just like looking at it."

Paris wraps his arms around him, leans up for a kiss. "That too."

Ging smiles. "You sick fucker."

-

Pariston is straightening his books on the shelves at his office when Cheadle knocks at his door.

He turns to beam at her with all the uncanny brightness of the contempt he holds for her.

"Cheadle! What a pleasure to have you here," he says, his voice drawling out in a subversion of make-believe happiness that he's sure she doesn't buy for a single second.

She nods once. Her fingers tighten around the handle of her tasteful suitcase. "Rat. Where's your husband?"

The word shifts around on her tongue with all the displeasure a human being can express through voice alone. Cheadle carries herself with all the perfect posture and formal politeness that stems from a life of achievements conquered through hard work and skill and nothing else. She's straightforward and truthful to a fault, efficient and smart and competent at what she does; she doesn't believe in underhanded methods or cheating in order to achieve her objectives. She believes in justice and decency and while she does respect Ging sometimes, she hates every single thing there is to hate about Pariston.

In another reality, they could be wonderful partners.

Pariston wants to make her bend under his custom-made leather shoes until she breaks in half.

"Back home, I would say. Want me to send your regards? I could call him over for the three of us to have coffee together. It's such a fine day outside."

"No need to. I'm here for business."

"Well, then," he makes a grand gesture. "Be my guest."

  
Cheadle opens her suitcase and drops a file on top of his desk. He opens it to see pictures of Hunters looking up at him.

"Hmm," he traces a straight line across one of their throats with the tip of his finger. "What is this?"

"I'm sure you know."

"If you'd be so kind as to enlighten me..."

"These are the pictures of the three Hunters that went missing last month."

He drags the corners of his lips down in a painfully fake mask of sorrow. It's not hard; he has been forcing himself to cry at the funerals of people he killed since he was 17. "That's heartbreaking. Hunters go missing often, though. Ging used to disappear every two years."

She slams a hand on top of the file. Her pretty eyes are burning over her glasses. "It's been over a month. You _know_ it's the Association's policy to start looking for Hunters who can't be tracked for longer than four weeks."

He shrugs in an act of self-deprecating defeat. "I'm very sorry, but I'm not a Lost Hunter. Even before my paperwork days, I was known as a Blacklist Hunter. I _could_ introduce you to some very efficient ones, though."

Her gloved hand curls into a fist. " _Why_ are you doing this? You were just appointed Vice-Chairman. You got your triple star. You _got married._ What else do you _want_ , Pariston?"

Pariston respects Cheadle with the same intensity he despises her. She's one of the most intelligent people he's ever met. She's a force to be reckoned with when she allows herself to step out of her comfort zone and he recognizes that.

Which is why he allows his mouth to curl into the psychotic smile he has been fighting back since she arrived. It's an uncanny smile, more sharp teeth than anything slightly resembling ordinary glee, the shadow over his eyes going dark and murderous, dragging the glazed-over look in his irises and shifting it into a vicious glint. It's a smile that reads, _I could kill you_ , that feels like, _and I'd love to._

He doesn't say anything. He couldn't explain it to her even if he tried, even if she were able to understand. He can't explain his desperation to secure what he can before it's all taken away from him, how impossible it is to him to stop predicting and analyzing and controlling, how absurdly _easy_ it is to make things work the way he wants them to. How he loves it when things go wrong.

How simple it is to make a handful of people go missing.

-

Netero calls him in the middle of the night.

“Chairman!” Pariston greets, his voice a mean mockery of delight. “What a pleasure to hear from you.”

“Goodnight, Pariston! Indeed, it is _not_ a pleasure to hear from you.”

Pariston lets out a charming little chuckle, that right at the end slides into something wicked. “Well, you were the one who called me.” he feels the control over his tone slip away from him, and when he speaks again, his tongue is sharp. “Where the _fuck_ are you?”

He's tired of doing paperwork by himself.

“Oh,” Netero laughs. “Somewhere far away.”

Pariston's tone drops to something low and dangerous. His hand grasps at the edge of his desk, his knuckles turning white. “If you don't get your ancient fucking ass back into your office next week at _most_ I'm destroying your place in the Association and everything in that antiquated, ridiculous building that you ever cared about.”

Netero's happy laughter sounds like static. Irritating static. “What is this, my trustworthy Vice-Chairman losing his composure?”

Pariston hisses. It's always harder to keep his civilized attitude in place and working properly after 2 in the morning.

“Is work that boring without me around? That can't be. I heard you got married, of all things!”

Pariston forces himself to relax back against his cushioned chair, lifts his left hand to his mouth and lightly bites his wedding ring. “Yes, that happened.

“So? How has it been?”

_Exhilarating. Unbelievable. Overwhelming. Sometimes I love him so much I want to kill him. Sometimes I want him to kill me._

Pariston shrugs. “It's okay.”

“I imagine the sex must be great.”

“How can you possibly imagine that.”

“I'm old as balls but I'm not blind. As soon as I introduced him to you, you two shared the most sexually intense handshake I've ever seen.”

_Perverted old man_ , Pariston thinks with a snarl.

“So?” Netero presses.

“What.”

“Is it good? I want to know if I’ve succeeded as a matchmaker.”

“I do believe that is none of your business, Chairman,” Pariston says, his voice perfectly level with no traces of emotion or even a slight hint of his accent. Still, inadvertently, his mind shifts to Ging, who is now sprawled out on the bed, lying on his stomach, fast asleep after Paris ate him out until he cried.

Pariston enjoys making Ging cry.

"Does Cheadle know already?" Netero asks, and that draws a little chuckle out of Pariston.

"She does."

"Amazing. I wish I could be there to see the meetings."

"Well, it's not like her displeasure at her two least favorite people in the world joining forces will go away any time soon."

“Yeah, but this marriage won't last, as I'm sure you're smart enough to realize. But, Pariston, listen.”

Pariston has to grit his teeth and strain his mouth into something vicious and sick that only slightly resembles his usual smile. He doesn't like it when people make assumptions. He likes it even less when they are right. “Yes?”

“Don’t let Ging get away.”

All of a sudden, Netero's voice turns serious enough that Pariston finds himself biting at his wedding ring again. He's noticing he's been doing it more and more as a nervous tick.

“Of course I won't.”

“No, pay attention. You two are going to get a divorce at some point soon. You _cannot_ let Ging leave what you have behind. He's far too used to leaving. But you're different, Pariston. I put you two together because you need each other. He signed up for this. He signed up for _you._ He doesn't get to forget you _._ ”

At some point, Pariston has gotten up and walked his way towards the master bedroom of their house, the shadows in the corners biting at his ankles, the smell of coffee from his father's mouth irritating his nose. When he stumbles back into his body, he's standing next to the king-sized bed, staring down at Ging's sleeping form on the twisted blankets.

He's gorgeous. He's cruel, the sharp curves of his body tempting and selfish. He's the only thing Pariston has ever truly wanted in years.

He's not getting away. Not that easily. Not at all.

“No,” Pariston breathes into his phone. “No, he doesn't. Thank you for your call, Chairman. I look forward to seeing you next week.”

He finishes the call quickly enough so he won't hear Netero's laughter, throws his phone aside on the bed. Takes off his shoes and climbs on the mattress, leaning forward to press a biting kiss on Ging's nape.

“Paris?” Ging whispers sleepily. Paris traces his spine, slides his hand down his naked back, over the curve of his ass.

“It's okay,” Paris breathes on his ear, delights in feeling the resulting shivers. His husband is so responsive. “It's just me.”

Ging arches back against him, his body moving beautifully in pure instinct, a sleepy smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “It's never _just you_ , Paris."

-

Pariston tries to brace himself for it. He knows it's close, he knows from the way it's started to rain almost every night, from how Ging starts doing his work on the balcony and not on the bedroom, lifting his gaze from the screen and looking at the sky, from how the glitches inside his own mind send violent shivers down his spine at random moments throughout the day.

His father talks to him one morning. He smells of formaldehyde and his eyes are milky-white and terrifying. “You won't keep this, son”, he says.

Pariston throws a glass at the wall. It shatters loudly and the awful sound brings him back to reality. The polished floor is cold on his bare feet and he thinks about cutting himself on the shards, but Ging dashes in from the hallway and catches him before he does.

“Don't,” he says, arms wrapped tight around Paris’ middle. Pariston can feel himself shaking as he leans back against Ging and tries not to cry.

“Shh, baby,” Ging hushes, tightening his hold around him. Paris clings to his arms so strongly his nails ding into his skin. “I’m here. It's okay.”

When Paris finally manages to get a grip on himself and stop shaking and biting back tears, Ging lends him his Super Mario flip flops so he won't step on the glass and cleans up what he can. Paris sits on the couch, legs crossed like a child, staring at the ceiling.

"What did he say to you?"

They've been married for a while. Ging knows how this goes.

Pariston shakes his head. "Doesn't matter."

Ging isn't good at comforting people. He turns his back on Paris and finishes throwing the shards away.

"He used to call me the devil."

Ging turns back around, frowning. "What?"

Pariston keeps his eyes focused on the white ceiling. It's easier to talk like this. This way he can pretend it didn't happen to him, he can pretend nothing is going to happen to them, he can pretend this is a good world where everything works and he can sleep at night. "My father. He used to call me the devil when I was a child."

"Why did he call you that?"

"He said I wasn't normal. I was too much. Too smart, too cunning." a pause, so long it draws Ging and his morbid curiosity forward to stand in front of him. "Too pretty."

Pariston lowers his gaze slightly to stare into Ging's eyes. "Have you ever seen any of my childhood pictures?"

Ging shakes his head.

"Well, I did get rid of most of them." Paris looks around for his father, but he's nowhere to be seen now. Probably hiding in some dark corner. Their house has a lot of those. "But I was a beautiful child. Everyone said so."

_So beautiful. His eyes, though. He always looks at us as if he's so superior._

"People said I was going to hell," Ging says, and he sounds empty, as if his tongue is voicing a mere recreation of someone else's memory, with no connection to his own life. "My mom. She said it wasn't her fault that I thought I was a boy. That she had never wanted this, this wasn't what she'd wished for when she got pregnant."

Pariston tilts his head to the side. He feels phantom pains on his neck. "What did you say?"

Ging shrugs. "Nothing. I cried, mostly."

Pariston extends his arms and Ging steps in closer to him, holds him, puts his head on his chest. It's comforting to hear his heartbeat, easy to cling to him when he knows this is something so easy to lose.

"Do you think we can make it?" he asks, voice hushed.

"I don't know."

-

It all starts with the arguing.

Here's the thing: neither Pariston nor Ging _argue._ Pariston because he doesn't need to, because no one poses as competition to him, because there's no need to get caught up in heated discussions if he already knows how to work all of them to his benefit, because as soon as anyone confronts him directly, it means they've already lost. Ging simply and purely because he doesn't care.

But marriage is different. Marriage is a game where either both win or both lose, marriage is a ruthless arena for a cowardly competition where the other knows all of your weak points.  

Marriage forces you to care.  

Their arguments are awful. They're always late at night and always because of the stupidest things and they always, always escalate into a big, dark mess of low blows and petty cruelty. Sometimes, it's so bad they both regret it afterward, and they kiss and make up, but still it eats away at them. It eats away at the routine they unconsciously built together during these years and it chips away at the paint on the walls of the house they made into their own and it gnaws at the unnamed, special thing they had wrapped around both their hearts.

Take two people who know exactly how to destroy each other. Make them each other's weak point. Sit back and watch as they will inevitably burn their own world down.

One night, they're arguing. It's raining, a full-blown thunderstorm outside, the water punching at the glass and the thunders lighting up their faces. They're fighting and Ging's body is lax with his vicious selfishness as he snarls and the windows are shaking with their screaming and the entire house is falling apart and Paris feels like he's back at his childhood home except now they're his parents and it's their fault and everything is going wrong and it wasn't supposed to be like this.

Suddenly, Pariston can't take this anymore.

There's always a moment - a split second of a moment - where he can physically feel the carefully constructed boundaries he set up around himself shatter. He’s felt it before. It was this split second that ruined so many lives he lost count. It was this split second that killed people and raised the disappearance rate in the Hunter Association. This split second that killed his father and dumped his corpse in a formaldehyde tank on that old anatomy laboratory.

It's always cold, unflinching in its psychotic cruelty.

Now, however, as he stares right into Ging's angry hazel eyes, the eyes he can, despite everything, feel himself falling in love with again, as he has done so many times before, every time he wakes up at his side, every time he goes to sleep - now there are tears streaming down his face.

“Shut up!” he yells, his voice breaking at the end, his hands curling into fists at his sides as lightning colors his face white and electric blue. “Shut up, shut _up!”_

He is tugged forward by the dark, murderous pull of his Nen before he even recognizes it as what it is.

_Oh, no_ , he thinks. _Not this. Anything but this._

He can't make it come back to him any more than he can control its awful power. He can only watch, his body shaking and his lips trembling like he's a little scared kid all over again, as the black aura wraps itself around Ging and seizes him by the throat, vicious curls of pitch black anger and fear that have followed Pariston throughout his entire life ever since his childhood, setting out to take hold of Ging's voice, hypnotizing him into shutting his mouth close.

Ging's spine is ramrod straight, his hands reaching for something around his neck, his lips so tightly closed Pariston can hear his teeth grinding together. It's cruel, it's as cowardly as it is unbeatable in its unrelenting hold. Ging's eyes are burning with unspoken, insane rage and an underlying glint of instinctive, bodily panic.

Ging is scared of him.

It can't last more than twenty seconds.

It's more than enough time.

When Pariston finally gets a grip on himself, enough to call his Nen back to him, coax it back inside the spot it lives in inside his heart and mind, Ging gasps and falls to his knees.

His face is pale, his lips dry, and when Pariston instinctively moves to touch him, he moves backward, away from him.

Pariston never knew how wrong it would be to see Ging afraid, like a glitch in the screen, like a crack in the fabric of the universe. He can feel the heart people always say he doesn't have breaking inside his ribcage.

"I'm-" he starts, stops. How can he say he's sorry? Is he sorry?

Pariston doesn't know how regret feels, but he imagines it must be something like this. The rain drowns out every single one of his coherent thoughts.

It takes a few moments, but Ging gets up on shaky legs, without his help. He supports himself on the dining table, arms straining with the effort, and grabs his keys; when he opens the front door, he doesn't look back.

"I'm going out," he says. His voice is trembling and he raises one tentative, protective hand to wrap around his throat.

He shuts the door behind himself.


	4. your killing floor and your morgue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'You look like you were the kind of child who liked setting things on fire,' Beyond says.
> 
> Pariston doesn't answer; he just reaches inside the internal pocket of his suit and takes out a golden lighter."
> 
> in which things get worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in? I know you want me to say it, Henry,  
> it’s in the script, you want me to say Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted  
> and worth dying for too  
> but I think I’d rather keep the bullet this time. It’s mine, you can’t have it, see,  
> I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s  
> as good as anything.  
> You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet  
> lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because  
> it’s all I have,  
> because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own."
> 
> (wishbone - richard siken)

"So," Piyon says, her pink nails tapping at the screen of her phone. "I heard Pariston and Ging got divorced."

Cheadle scowls. "Fuck."

Piyon shifts her attention to her pink laptop and quickly types away at the keyboard. She's working on two translations of ancient texts and one essay at the same time, and Cheadle often gets dizzy just by watching her. "Just thought you should know before the meeting started."

Mizai takes a sip of his coffee. "Ging won't show up, though. He never does unless the Chairman calls him directly."

Piyon tsks, shakes her head - her bunny ears move adorably. "But Pariston won't miss the opportunity to cope with his bad mood by making us dance around in his schemes. You all know how he is when he's mad."

"Is he mad?"

"Hopefully. He's worse when he's depressed."

Cheadle sighs. "I wish the Chairman were here to help us deal with him."

Mizai straightens his back as if he's getting ready for a fight. "Well, we knew we would have to deal with this at some point."

"Actually," Cheadle says, in a lower tone, meant just for her closest friend - they're standing side by side and for a moment she wishes she could lean against him - "I almost thought they would stay together."

Mizai raises an eyebrow.

"They... _get_ each other," she explains helplessly. "I don't know. They understand each other."

"Yes, well," he downs the rest of his coffee and moves to take his assigned seat. "Unfortunately it takes more than that to make a marriage work, apparently."

Pariston arrives twenty minutes late to the meeting. When he does, he doesn't apologize for his tardiness - he merely takes his chair from where it's placed beside Mizai's and slides it all the way to the head of the table. He puts his suitcase down, rolls his neck, sighs; when he lifts his head to look at them, his plastic smile is in place, but his eyes are far emptier than usual, more vacant than anyone has ever seen them.

"Good morning, fellow Zodiacs," he greets. "Let's start this meeting, shall we?"

Cheadle and Mizai exchange glances.

Pariston absolutely _murders_ every single one of the Zodiacs during the entire duration of the reunion. He goes through every topic of the agenda with a merciless pace that none of them, not even Cheadle with all her righteous anger or Botobai with all his decades-long experience in dealing with terrible people, can even dream of keeping up with. He is cruel with his attention to every detail, every twist and turn he can figure out within a rule or an amendment used like weapons to drag the arguments into his desired result.

To every opposing position, he has something, be it a cowardly perfect technicality or a flawless piece of emotional manipulation lovingly handpicked for each one of them - he toys and plays with Mizaistom's savior issues and Cheadle's moral compass and Piyon's fickle attention span and Kanzai's short temper until they've all danced straight into his plans, every piece fitting where it was supposed to.

It drags on forever, the weight of defeat tugging at everyone's shoulders. When he dismisses them for the day, it's late at night, almost 10pm, and the Zodiacs scatter out of the meeting room with shadows under their eyes and barely mumbled "good work" to each other.

Cheadle leaves throwing a look at Mizaistom, who's still gathering his papers in his suitcase and his wits inside his brain, just before she closes the door behind herself.  

When Pariston moves to get up, he loses balance on his legs for a moment, and the world is spinning - and Mizai grabs his arm and steadies him again.

His eyes are infinitely kind and his hold is strong when he asks, "Did you eat anything today?"

Pariston places a hand on top of his and forcibly drags it away from his arm, painfully grinding bones together in its vicious strength. He leans closer, his mouth inches away from Mizai's ear, and his breath is colder than it should be. "Don't use me for your personal, stupid hero complex, handsome," he whispers, just for the two of them to hear, the uncanny cruelty of his sickly sweet voice bleeding from the corner of his pretty lips. "I'm not going to be a glorified coping mechanism because you can't deal with your own issues and need to save someone in order to feel like you deserve to be alive." he runs his fingers under the hem of Mizai's shirt. "Go talk to your puppy and see her bat her pretty eyelashes at you and fuck a child into her if you want to, but don't treat me like your pet project of make-believe kindness. I don't need it. More than that, I don't _want_ it."

He presses a kiss to Mizai's cheek and leaves the meeting room.

-

Brushing and gently unmaking the knots in Kite's long hair remains as easy as Ging remembers it being.

Back when they first met, Ging used to do it twice a day, every morning after they woke up and every night before they went to sleep. It was a simple process, still is: taking Kite to a bathtub filled with warm water, working shampoo and conditioner into his silver locks, drying him with a fluffy towel, taking him back to the bedroom, and, with a wide-tooth comb, working through the knots and tangles until his beautiful hair was smooth and soft.

Sometimes, they talk and do light conversation. Other times, they just stay quiet and enjoy the comfort of each other's familiar aura. At the end, Ging always presses a kiss to the top of Kite's head.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Kite asks as he looks forward, feeling the pull of the comb on the knots.

"Not really," Ging answers. Kite doesn't insist.

Kite doesn't like Pariston Hill. The feeling is mutual and noticeable. He likes Pariston when he's being sweet and nice and cuddling him and petting his hair, and he hates him when he's being cruel, which is almost always, so he doesn't like him. And Pariston is just jealous of him all the time. So, he would've expected the divorce to feel relieving.

However, it's strange to see Ging without his wedding ring.

It's strange to make a mental note to erase his 'go visit ging at swaldani 18th - weekend' appointment from his calendar, because Ging doesn't have a permanent address anymore. At some point in these last few years, Kite realizes with a startle, he got used to seeing his mentor as a married man and Pariston as a company he just had to deal with; it's strange to talk to Ging and not hear a 'hey, honey' from a fakely gentle voice immediately after.

At some point, Kite got used to Pariston and his pet names and his awful smiles and amazing pancakes, and now he has to get used to just Ging again.

Which is nice, in a way. But Ging is quieter now. More mature, yes, but sadder.

"So, what will you be doing?" Ging asks. He puts the comb aside and sets out to braiding Kite's hair, his movements slow in their care.

Kite sits up straighter. "I have a biological survey to do back in Kakin, commissioned by the government, but the IPA is making things difficult. Part of my team is already there, and I've been trying for a few weeks, but -"

Ging's scoff behind him interrupts his speech. It sounds angry, and resentful. He ties the end of the braid with a string twisted in a bow and extends his hand. "Of course they are. Lend me your phone, will you?"

Kite does. Ging punches in a number and, as soon as the person picks up, he starts talking.

"Don't put Kite into this. He has nothing to do with it."

 _Oh,_ Kite realizes. _Oh._

Ging scowls as he listens to whatever Pariston is saying to him on the other end of the line. His shoulders are tense, his voice seething with irritation, "Of _course_ it was you, why else would he - No! No, listen, just -"

He stops for a moment, listening, his teeth biting into his lower lip - for a second, his thumb moves as if he wants to touch the place where his wedding ring used to be, but he curls his hand into a fist at the last second. "Here's the thing, Paris," he snarls, the nickname coming out poisonous from between his canines. "I'm not going to rush back to fucking Swaldani City or into your penthouse just because you're making Kite's life harder. Leave him alone."

Pariston is still talking, but Ging interrupts him. "No, _you_ listen to me. If you don't fix this by tonight at the latest, I swear to God I'm never looking at your face again in my life. Do you understand?"

More talking from the other end of the line. It sounds cynical, from what Kite can hear. Pariston's cynicism is sharp and it cuts deep.

"Don't _sweetheart_ me, you scumbag."

Pariston answers something that makes Ging's face go livid with anger.

"Fuck you," he near-whispers. His hand is curled into a fist like he wants to hurt someone who isn't there. Kite shivers, wraps his arms around himself. "Fuck you, Paris."

Ging ends the phone call, throws the phone aside, rubs his face with his hands. He looks very tired.

"I'm so sorry you had to be here for this," he says gently when he lifts his head. He really sounds sorry. He opens his arms for Kite to snuggle with him, kisses his forehead and his cheeks. "I'm sorry, honey."

Kite hides his face on Ging's shoulder, shakes his head. "It's okay," he mumbles, but wraps his arms around his neck all the same and lets Ging pull him into proper cuddling position.

Kite doesn't _need_ this kindness, this softness, but he likes it. He likes having all of Ging's attention and he likes the pet names and he likes being held as if he's something precious.

"Been a while since it was just the two of us, huh?" Ging whispers. His voice is filled with longing and with something else Kite doesn't want to think about right now.

Kite nuzzles him so he can get more kisses. "Yeah. I missed you."

"I'm here now, baby."

Kite's first instinct is to wonder, _for how long? You left your husband, when are you going to leave me?_

Then Ging grabs his chin and tilts his head up and presses their lips together and Kite doesn't wonder about anything anymore.

-

Pariston starts spending his nights in his office.

The Zodiacs have some of the fanciest offices in the Association, and, since being appointed as Vice-Chairman, Pariston got an even better one, up on the top floor, with a beautiful view of the city and more shelves and a prettier carpet.

The best part is the small bedroom that can be accessed by a door on the wall opposite to the windows - it's for his exclusive use only, and it has nothing but a bedside table, a lamp and a single bed. He hasn't slept in his actual bed back at his penthouse for a week.

Everything still smells like Ging. It's like every breakup cliché, except worse, because Paris actually feels like _something_ has been robbed from the empty space behind his rib cage where his heart was supposed to be.

It's like being stabbed with a knife in a back alley, except the knife never leaves. It just twists and turns inside his body.

He needs to learn how to be alone again.

He limps his way to his cushioned desk chair - yesterday, he stepped on glass.

 _Don't_ , he could hear Ging's voice saying close to his ear, so close it gave him shivers.

 _You're not even here,_ he said as he bled on his perfect white carpet, said it to all the dark corners in his house, all the folds in his blankets, all the empty spaces in his closet, all the plural pronouns shifting to singular ones. _You left me. You coward._

_You made me leave you, Paris._

He leans back on the chair, stares up at the ceiling. It's late, sometime after 1 in the morning, and his father places a patronizing hand on top of his head, large and controlling, and says, "You always ruin all the good things, don't you. Little devil."

Paris shakes him off and straightens his spine again - his perfect ballet dancer posture that never left him, not even when it's been over ten years since he left his town -,  organizes the papers on his new desk, grabs his favorite pink gel pen.

He knows what he wants. He has known since he became a Hunter, since he stepped foot into the Association building for the first time. His marriage with Ging Freecs was a little detour. Maybe the last time in his life he was ever happy. But happiness is nothing when compared to the sheer obsession inside every single one of his bones.

He ignores the empty space on his ring finger - the two golden wedding rings are hidden on the bottom of his bedside drawer. He ignores the voices inside his head and the eyes on every one of the four walls around him and he sets to work, like always.

-

In the morning, Ging kisses Kite's forehead one last time before getting up from the bed.

 _I love you_ , he thinks about saying, but he doesn't. He doesn't know what love is anymore.

-

"You look like you were the kind of child who liked setting things on fire," Beyond says.

Pariston doesn't answer; he just reaches inside the internal pocket of his suit and takes out a golden lighter.

Beyond Netero laughs.

They've met up for lunch in a fancy restaurant near the Association. Pariston would rather not think about how relieving it is to have lunch with someone instead of simply ignoring  his hunger and skipping the meal because if Ging's not there to make him eat, then he will not eat at all, because it's better to starve than pick at his food by himself in his new office.

Beyond takes a big bite of his meat. He's so much like his father, in that sense; they both want anything and everything they can get their hands on. "So, things are working."

Pariston nods gracefully. He feels light-headed, and his vision is blurry at the edges, his body lidded with goosebumps. He decides to avoid making sudden movements. "They're working. You may check the records of missing Hunters, if you want evidence."

Beyond laughs heartily. "It's fine. I trust your efficiency. Do they suspect you? My father's Zodiacs?"

"They always suspect me."

"Is there any chance of them stopping you?"

Pariston fiddles with the cuffs of his shirt. The sun is too bright and it hurts his head. Ging used to say he was photophobic. Maybe he is. "The only man who could think about stopping me is not available at the moment." _or interested in doing so._

Sometimes, Pariston thinks about how perfectly he set up his situation. His ability is such that no one who knows about it remains alive for long, and the one person who is still living has no interest in getting in his way.

He eyes the golden lighter on the table. He could set the world on fire.

Beyond takes another bite of his meal. Pariston is starting to getting sick just by looking at his.

"So, you heard the rumors," Beyond says.

Paris delicately pushes his plate away from himself. "I did. A Chimera Ant somewhere around NGL. They say it could be a queen."

Beyond seems impressed. "How do you even know about these things? I wouldn't take you for the type to leave your office."

 _My ex-husband's disciple told him about the rumors regarding weird animal sightings in NGL. My ex-husband told me. (Ex-husband,_ he wonders _, what a precious, strange little word). After that, it was easy to find out the details. There's not much left to do when you've been incapable of sleeping for the last week, and researching about Chimera Ants and their biology is more interesting than staring at the ceiling._

A shrug. "I know where to find information."

"So, you know what that means."

Paris takes a sip of his glass of water to try and minimize the black spots plaguing his vision. They look like ghosts who want to catch him. "Since it's the NGL, it'll take a while for the news to spread. It's a major biohazard, but the V5 won't want to deal with it - so they'll push for the Hunter Association. The Chairman has always wanted a strong opponent, so he'll deal with it himself. Depending on where we're standing at the timeline and on the circumstances when it comes to reproduction and evolution, he might get to fight the Royal Guards or maybe the King himself. He'll resign and call for an election to pick the new Chairman."

"He could die," Beyond says, and he sounds amused.

"He could," Paris concedes.

"Will you help him if he asks for help?"

"No," Paris answers with the same ease he uses when ordering a piece of cheesecake.

"Why not?"

"If he wanted a Vice-Chairman to help him when he needs it, he wouldn't have picked me."

Beyond laughs again. "That makes sense. You don't look like a very trustworthy subordinate."

 _I'm not,_ Paris wants to say, but that would take all the fun out of it. Beyond has no idea of just how painful Paris' knife can be when it's stabbing someone in the back. "And yet you want me as your number two on the expedition."

"Obviously. Your reputation is astoundingly awful. I would rather have you by my side than as my enemy. Still, I have yet to see this ability of yours."

Paris shakes his head. "You'd have to get on my bad side to see it."

"How do I know you're not making empty threats?"

Paris tilts his head to the side. He can feel the corners of his lips tugging into what he knows is his most psychotic smile, the most bloodthirsty one, the one he keeps just on the edge of his carefully curated mask, the one he inherited straight from the corpse of his father being buried 6 feet down the soft earth of the graveyard in his hometown. "Do I look like the type of man who makes empty threats?"

-

"You know," Paris says, eyeing her back and the curve of her ass and the lines of her waist as he buttons up his shirt. "I keep wondering when you're going to marry Mizai already."

Cheadle's entire body goes tense. Paris smiles.

She pulls up her heavy, long dress, zips it up without Paris' help - Cheadle appears to have an unspoken rule, where she will ask Pariston to unzip her clothes and put them back on without even looking in his eyes. It's like she can deal with the vulnerability of being seen naked, but not with having him watch her rebuild herself in the morning.

She doesn't answer and sets out to dealing with the tangles in her hair. His smile pulls wider.  

"Have you fucked him already?" he asks, his voice deceptively casual. "From my experience, you two would be very compatible. Sexually speaking, that is."

Cheadle pauses in her movements and takes a deep, frustrated breath. "None of your business. Rat."

"So you haven't." he steps closer to her, takes the comb out of her slack fingers and starts brushing her hair himself, a hand on her nape. She leans back in his touch unconsciously - she's as touch-starved as he is. "What a waste."

He finds himself mimicking the movements he used to brush Kite's hair back when he stayed over at the penthouse and Ging was nowhere to be found in the morning. But Cheadle doesn't turn to look at him, doesn't spare a single glance, endures the softness with all the stoicism she uses for everything else in her life.

Outside the bed, that is.

"You think he likes you?" he breathes into her ear. She shivers - a mix of desire and disgust. "I think he does. It doesn't matter. Either way, you should get married. White picket fence and kids with his cheekbones and your eyes."

"Stop projecting your failed dreams into me and Mizaistom."

He chuckles, wraps his fingers in her hair, pulls just to see her gasp.

-

Ging snaps a picture of the small test tube that contains the claw of the Chimera Ant Queen's severed arm.

"Who are you gonna send that to?" Kite asks.

"Who do you think?"

Kite shakes his head but says nothing.

 _wanna play?_ , is the caption of the picture.

A few minutes later, Ging's phone buzzes. It's a picture taken in Paris' new office - on top of his beautiful mahogany desk, there's an official document; the V5 is legally leaving all responsibilities regarding the possible biohazard posed by the apparition of Chimera Ants in NGL's territory in the Hunter Association's hands.

Signed and approved by Vice-Chairman Pariston Hill. The perfect curves of his handwriting in lilac ink are painfully familiar.

 _Do try to keep up, sweetheart <3 _, reads the text right under the photo.

Ging's smile has teeth.  



	5. like we're something interesting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "As Ging crosses the room to reach the door, Paris' hand flies and suddenly takes hold of his arm.
> 
> 'Are you leaving on the 9 pm train?'
> 
> Ging nods. 
> 
> Paris nods. 'Okay.'"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,  
>  smiling in a way  
>  that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,  
>  up the stairs of the building  
> to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,  
>  I looked out the window and said  
>  This doesn’t look that much different from home,  
>  because it didn’t,  
> but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.  
>  We walked through the house to the elevated train."
> 
> (litany in which certain things are crossed out - richard siken)

"How did you even manage to get your hands on these?" Ging asks as he goes through a small pile of votes. 

"Legal precedent," Pariston answers. 

Ging scoffs. "Yeah, right."

They're sitting on the floor of Paris' new office - Ging has put away his old, torn hat thirty minutes ago, and his hair sticks up everywhere, a few bangs flopping weirdly over his forehead. His feet are bare on the fancy, blood red carpet. 

He's still exactly as gorgeous as he's always been, erratic and brilliant still, his beautiful lips full with smart words, his sharp Nen piercing at the edges of Paris' perception. 

Paris wants to throw him on his back and fuck the arrogance out of him. Wants to slit his throat and see him bleeding over all the official papers he has yet to sign. 

"No, but I mean it. Legal precedents from previous Chairman elections state that, if needed, the Vice-Chairman has the power to oversee the proceedings of the voting and counting of those votes. Since the Zodiacs were assigned as the council by the former Chairman, normally I wouldn't have individual, private access to the votes, seen as those precedents do talk about the possibility of the existence of a council set up for this particular task, and mentions they would have authority over mine in this specific case. Netero probably left this mission in our collective hands so I wouldn't have the power to control it by myself, which was a really fucking smart move on his part." 

He pauses to take a sip of coffee. It's very late at night, and his eyelids are heavy with exhaustion. He wishes he could sleep. " _ However _ , because the council decided Beans is the only one allowed to see who voted in whom, that aspect of the proceedings is, therefore, not being overseen by the Zodiacs  _ as a group _ , which means they're not acting on it, which means someone has to. Therefore, since it's needed, I get to look at these. Even more, it's stated in the precedents that, in such an occasion, I would have to be supervised by someone from the council. Alas, there you are."

Ging laughs. It sounds as cruel and beautiful as it did before, as if the late hours are a different dimension where everything is the same as it was. It sends the same thrill down Paris' spine as it did years ago. 

“You demon," he says, delighted. "Beans was probably so fucking mad.”

"Oh, he was." Paris brings out his pink bullet journal to take notes about the people he'll have to threaten and bribe into changing their votes. "Specially because there was nothing he could do about it.”

Ging crawls closer to him to take a peek into what he's writing. He's so much like a child - Paris almost forgot what it was like, watching Ging's genius mind shift and twist as it searches for something to entertain him. 

He derives a sick delight from knowing that even if he broke Ging's heart, at least he didn’t bore him. 

"What are you writing?"

"People I want dead," Paris answers with ease. There are always people he wants dead, but with the election, he needs to keep a comprehensive list of all of them. "Wanna kill them for me?"

Ging shrugs him off. "Killing is boring. Do it yourself."

Paris twirls his pen on his fingers. "I would just love for Teradein and Bushidora to stay the fuck out of my way. Preferably dead."

Ging rips a page off his journal and starts making a paper airplane. "You don't even want to win this shit."

"You're right, I don't. But I want to _ play _ , and they're not _ letting _ me."

"Just kill them, then."

"As much as I'd like to believe so, Cheadle and Mizaistom are  _ not _ that stupid. I'm not making this that easy to the law school king and queen power couple."

Ging hums, lies down on his belly, pillows his head on top of his arms. "I mean, there is the Zoldyck situation," he says and throws his paper airplane. It does a perfect curve on the air and lands on top of the desk.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"The oldest Zoldyck brat is working with that killer clown who was looking for me in the first day of the elections. I heard they're engaged or something, and they're out for blood. You should work that out somehow."

"Huh." Paris gets up and types a bit at his computer before nodding to himself. "Yes, I suppose with the Bylaws -"

"Yep." Ging rips off another page to make a boat. "Makes it easier to change them later too. Since they're so fucking boring now."

"You have a point." Paris frowns down at him. "But why are you being so helpful?"

Ging turns to lie on his back and starts trying to balance his tiny paper boat on top of his forehead. "Because I'm  _ bored _ , Paris. Everything's  _ boring. _ Beyond is taking  _ forever  _ to do something and I want entertainment."

"Oh, I see." Paris leans back, crosses his arms. "Did you hear about Kite? That could be a source of entertainment."

Ging pauses in his movements. He sits up, little boat falling to the floor, and scratches the back of his neck in that particular way Paris has always interpreted as him not knowing how to deal with a situation.

There's a scar there, Paris knows, a small white scar on the base of Ging's skull, as if the devil knocked him on his knees and stole his soul through that little patch of skin on his nape many years ago. Back when they were married, back an entire lifetime and then some ago, Paris kissed it often, a nighttime prayer, but he kept forgetting to ask its origin, the mark of past hurt just one of many on Ging's beautiful, cold body - and now, his mind twists and turns around this incomplete piece of information. He never asked, and now he will never know, because his ex-husband is across the office from him and there might as well be a freezing ocean between them. 

"I heard… some things," Ging mutters, and the very peculiar way his eyes shift to the floor tell that he's embarrassed. Paris has long ago learned the difference between Ging's embarrassment and the convoluted shape his remorse takes. "And you?"

Paris knows about Kite. In Netero's absence, all the reports from all the Hunters who participated in any way in the Chimera Ant situation went to his desk and nowhere else. He studied each and every one of them in his insomniac, hungry nights. He knows how the Royal Guard who ripped Kite's head off and then stitched his body back together and made him into a puppet was called. He received extensive reports about their abilities. He knows the names of the people who found him in that state, he knows about Gon's reaction and what it caused, he knows Gon is in the hospital in a coma and no one dares get close to his destroyed body. 

He also knows Ging probably isn't aware of any of this. 

He would rather not lie, but he's not feeling agreeable enough to actually tell him, so he just stays silent. 

"Okay," Ging says, and rubs his face with his hands. "Okay."

_ Not okay _ , Paris wants to say.  _ None of this is okay.  _

He pushes to step forward, closer to Ging, and his vision goes black - immediately he stumbles back, leaning heavily against his desk again. His knuckles are white where his fingers grab at the edge so he can keep himself upright. 

He closes his eyes, presses his trembling hand to his forehead, takes a deep breath. He can feel the cruel sting of Ging's aura instinctively moving closer to him as the man gets up. It would’ve been reassuring before; now, it’s just insulting. He shivers with a cold glitch in his mind. "No," he snaps as he fumbles to loosen the knot of his tie. "Don't you dare."

Ging stops. Paris sits on top of his desk and hugs his knees and waits until the world isn't spinning around anymore. The sunlight hits the back of his neck like it wants to kill him. Everything has been trying to kill him since he was born. 

"How often has this been happening?" Ging asks and there's a single, lonely note of worry in his apathetic voice and it's  _ infuriating _ . Pariston ignores him and concentrates on making his heart stop hammering in his chest as if it's trying to break his ribcage from the inside out. 

"You do know this is low blood pressure, right? This is gonna keep happening until you start eating decently." 

"Fuck off," Paris snarls. His ears are ringing.

"Have you been sleeping at all?"

Pariston raises his head and stares at Ging with all the strength of his exhausted rage. "None of your business, handsome. Hasn't been your business since you walked out on me. You've never cared before, don't you dare start giving a shit now. You're not here because you worry about me, you're here because you're  _ curious _ and because you're  _ bored _ and you want me to fuck your issues out of you and Kite can't do that because they don't have a dick anymore."

It catches Ging by surprise, which is one of the hardest things to do when it comes to him, but a second later he shifts his expression into that indifferent mask of tedium that he uses for everyone. 

Ging has never looked at him the same way he looks at everyone else. 

"Okay, then, Paris," he says and takes a keyring out of the pocket of his slacks and throws carelessly it on the desk before turning on his heels to leave. The sound of the keys hitting the wood is deafening. "I only came here to return these anyway. You can throw yourself out of a window for all I care."

Paris clumsily reaches for the keys, takes them in his palm. "What are those?"

"Beach house," Ging explains, his voice hard with an apathy he obviously doesn't feel. "Divorce agreement says it's yours, so I'm giving you my copy of the keys back."

Paris blinks. The keys look unreal in his hand, like they have no weight and no shape, like he's holding air. He remembers getting these done for Ging, just after their impromptu honeymoon, maybe, or maybe on one of their anniversaries - his memory is so hazy, his mind slow. Remembers handing them to him, the smile that earned him, the kiss, the 'thank you.'

"Oh. Alright."

Ging doesn't turn to him, but he stops walking toward the door. "I fixed the old chair by the porch. Just - just to let you know. It was before we signed the - those fucking papers. It was creaking a lot and - well. Just so you know."

Pariston stares at the keys. "Thank you."

"Also changed the lightbulb in the kitchen."

Paris nods. What can he say? Ging starts leaving again, and he inhales sharply, "Ging," he calls. 

Ging looks over his shoulder. Paris doesn't know why he called him. 

"What?"

Paris shakes his head. He doesn't know. Even if he did, he doesn't think he would be able to explain. And even if he could explain, he isn't sure Ging would care. "It's nothing."

 

 

- 

 

Ging doesn't know exactly  _ what _ he's looking for when he goes to the Hunter Association's hangars, but he's looking for  _ something.  _

Pariston's aura is discrete and almost untraceable if one is not specifically searching for it, but after years of living together, Ging is familiar with it in a nearly instinctive level. It has a very specific feeling to it - bitter and dark and defensive, like a small, feral child baring their teeth at you, ready to bite at your jugular and draw blood. It's easy to follow it, easy to trace his footsteps and search for that shiver that always, always runs down his spine when he's getting close. 

It almost feels like going home.

Elliot is doing repairs in one of the bigger zeppelins when Ging arrives in the main hangar.

"Yo," Ging greets. 

Elliot jumps to the ground and rushes to clasp a friendly hand on Ging's shoulder. "Ging Freecs. It's been a while."

"How's your husband?" Elliot asks, and Ging winces. 

The most daily of tasks gets ruined by his history with Pariston. 

"Ex-husband," he corrects, and hopes his voice doesn't come out sounding as sharp as it did when the word ripped its way up his throat.

"Oh. Oh, okay."

Sometimes, Ging can see his loneliness reflected in other people's eyes.

"Yeah. What are you doing out here, slaving out on a weekend?"

Elliot huffs, stretches his arms high above his head. "Vice-Chairman has been working me and the boys to death. Some stuff he wants delivered. Normally, I'd complain, but he pays  _ well _ , the rich bastard, and we all want some extra cash for the holidays, huh?"

"Stuff? In the middle of the election?"

"Dunno. He wouldn't say and it's not our place to ask, y'know. I shouldn't be telling this but," Elliot shrugs, "you were going to figure it out anyway."

While Elliot might have a point there, Ging wonders just how much of this was predicted by said ex-husband. "So I take that these trips aren't officially on the record?"

"Oh, c'mon, dude. You are -  _ were _ married to the man. You know he never does anything on the record. And with all this election mess, no one is really paying attention."

Elliot is a good man. He's a good Lost Hunter, efficient, a genius with airplanes and zeppelins. He taught Ging how to fly a helicopter when he was seventeen and didn't ask for anything in return. 

Which is why Ging indulges a while longer on light conversation with him, about the election and planes and mutual acquaintances, and waits until Elliot has to leave to take care of something or other and only then does he sneak into the biggest zeppelin in the empty hangar. 

He doesn't want to find out later that Elliot mysteriously went missing after a trip to the beach.

Ging is almost relieved to see Paris isn't trafficking human bodies or people (he wouldn't put it above him - he wouldn't put  _ anything _ above Paris). These are cargo zeppelins, he notices as he steps inside, filled with numerous containers, labeled for  _ dangerous biological content.  _ When he carefully opens one of them, he finds himself staring at dozens and dozens of Chimera Ant cocoons, safely preserved but obviously ready to hatch at a moment's notice. 

He opens some more containers, but he finds more of the same thing, and he knows that's all that he's going to find inside the other cargo zeppelins on the other hangars.

He sits down in the middle of the cardboard boxes. They're piled up in small towers, like a tiny city of inevitable catastrophe. 

Surprisingly, he thinks of his son. 

He knows about Gon in his hospital bed - Cheadle, with all her impossible medical curiosity and authority on the area, found her way to his bedside as soon as he was transferred from West Gorteau to the emergency wing of the Swaldani hospital, and then rushed back to yell at Ging's face for not being there, to which Ging snorted,  _ if you're such a good doctor, you know better than anyone that I have no business being there. How could I possibly be of any help? _

Here, sitting with his legs crossed like a child in the middle of dozens of Chimera Ant cocoons, brought here by little more than his ex-husband's cruel whim (because, for all their complexity and intricacies, Paris' plans and his games with Ging are hardly anything more than cruel, childish whims), he thinks about what brought him to this. What took him from a small, confining island shaped like a whale in the middle of the ocean to  _ this _ .

He wonders if Gon thought so too, just before giving up on everything. He wonders about the paths and decisions that took Gon from being just a little, rosy-cheeked thing pressed against Ging's chest to being a glorified corpse in a hospital, surrounded by such darkness that no one can get close to him.

He wonders about the shadows on Paris’ face, how thin he looks, how exhausted.

Ging feels very young suddenly, a mismatched mess of mistakes and poor decisions. 

He leans back against one of the bigger cardboard boxes and stares idly into the distance until a different container catches his flimsy attention.

It's almost hidden behind cocoons, reinforced with thicker glass. Inside it, a severed head floats in formaldehyde that was enriched with Nen (a formula created by Cheadle years ago in order to conserve dead bodies in a much better, near-living state for incredible amounts of time, meant for studying purposes). It clearly belonged to a Chimera Ant, a fact deduced from the butterfly antennae coming out from the top of the head, but this one doesn't look at all like Ging would expect from a being of their species; it belonged to someone  _ pretty _ , fair skin and long eyelashes, delicate cheekbones and beautiful blonde hair down to the well-drawn chin. Someone who looked ageless, someone whose hands could either murder or caress, a piece of art made living then made corpse then back into a twisted variation of art, meant to be admired. 

Ging takes it in his hands and looks at the closed eyelids of the deceased Chimera Ant. He can almost understand why Paris would want to keep this for himself. 

_ Sick fucker, _ he thinks, and gently places the container back where he found it.

Perhaps, he muses as he absently checks the other, larger containers, only to find more cocoons, this is the fatal difference between them, the one crack they could not ignore. There is something  _ wrong _ with Pariston, deep inside him, something too vicious, too disturbed. Maybe his heart works in a different rhythm, off-beat and awful.

Ging remembers Kite saying once,  _ I don't like him. His fingers twitch and he doesn't blink enough. _

His heart always sounded normal when Ging rested his head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat, though. Painfully normal; absolutely human in its lonely perseverance.

 

-

 

"So," Pariston says, handing Kite the bottle of conditioner, "you leave this on your hair for 3 minutes. It'll make it softer."

Kite eyes it for a moment before taking it and sliding the glass door shut again. "Okay."

Pariston sits on the sink and waits, kicks the air idly. Kite comes out of the shower, water sliding down their tanned, smooth curves, little trails and rivers between their breasts and over their collarbones. More water drips from the ends of their red hair.

Pariston reaches for them. "Let me put your hair up while you wait."

Kite shakes their head. "I'll do it."

Pariston nods gracefully, lowers his hand and watches as they expertly twist their red locks and curl them around themselves in a wet bun on top of their head. After they're done with that, Kite slides their small hands down their naked body to get rid of some of the exceeding water and then sits down on top of the closed lid of the toilet.

"Tell me when the 3 minutes are up," they say. 

Pariston checks his watch. "I will."

This Kite is different, Pariston muses as he allows his eyes to slide up and down their curves. This Kite is fiery like their shockingly red strands of hair. Demanding, sharp and cunning and snarky. There's some of their old introspection and introverted tendencies from their previous lifetime hidden somewhere, displayed in a tilt of the head, a shuffling of feet - but this Kite brushes their own hair every morning and touches everything they see and steps out of the shower completely naked and careless in their bare skin. 

"What are you looking at?" they ask, tilting their chin up. Water slides down the column of their neck. 

"Just thinking."

They raise an eyebrow. "About?"

"You. The old you."

"Hm," Kite crosses their legs. Their thighs are thicker now, their feet smaller. Pariston does his best not to stare. "I remember you, you know."

"I figured. You wouldn't have come over if you didn't."

"I remember disliking you. But also enjoying some moments - some days. The movies, the cuddling. You were sweet sometimes," they say, and their eyes are huge and painfully frank. 

"So were you." 

Sweet Kite, with his white hair and his broken heart and his taste for cupcakes. 

"I remember Ging too."

"What do you remember?"

Their eyes shine with a devotion that spans entire lifetimes. If the red hair and the plump breasts aren't familiar,  _ this  _ is as familiar to Pariston as life itself, how Kite's existence spins around Ging, how it takes over their heart still, this  _ desperation,  _ near hunger. "Everything."

"And you still love him?"

"I do. Don't you?"

"Does it matter?" Paris leans against the mirror over the sink. He's so tired. The polished glass makes the dark circles under his eyes look darker. "He's not here for either of us."

His watch beeps. The three minutes are up. Kite stands up with a sigh, lets their hair down and enters the shower again, turns on the water. 

 

-

 

“I'm leaving today," Ging announces at the end of the reunion. 

“ _ Finally _ ,” Cheadle says, snapping her suitcase shut. She still hasn't forgiven him or Pariston for the mockery of an election they both put her through. 

The day-long reunion was the first of a series of carefully scheduled Zodiac meetings that have the purpose of managing the transition between Netero's presidency and Cheadle's. Ging has absolutely no interest in such chores - he napped on the table during most of it, head pillowed on his arms, and only woke up to see his fellow Zodiacs yelling at each other when they started debating the Hunter Bylaws. 

Paris, surprisingly, said very little; he just leaned back on his chair and watched as everyone else argued. Ging knows he forced Cheadle's hand to change the Bylaws, and he is even more familiar with Paris' infamous patience when it comes to harboring the results of his intricate plans. Without his ex-husband teasing and taunting and driving everyone mad, the reunion was just downright tedious. 

“Have a safe trip,” Mizai says, with the polite kindness that colors every single one of his words, as if both Ging and Paris aren't perfectly aware of just how filthy that tongue can be in bed.  

"Thanks, Mizai."

Paris, on his part, quietly scoffs from where he's gathering his papers. Ging imagines he did nothing other than doodle on them. He can be quite talented with his doodles when he's bored at a meeting.

As Ging crosses the room to reach the door, Paris' hand flies and suddenly takes hold of his arm.

Ging instinctively shrugs him off - he's still wary of his forceful touches. His throat itches with ghost pain. 

"Are you leaving on the 9 pm train?" 

Ging nods. 

Paris nods. "Okay."

Ging leaves the meeting room, ignores the urge to press his fingers against the patch of skin that Paris gripped so viciously, and wonders if he should say goodbye to Kite. Gon he already saw off the day before, the boy waving excitedly as he entered a zeppelin headed to Whale Island, Ging unable to fight the feeling that he ruined yet another person's life.  

Kite is a different subject, though. Old Kite didn't speak unless Ging allowed him to, old Kite always walked just a step behind him, old Kite clung to him with all the devotion of a child rescued from drowning in the ocean and all the adoration of a boy who's fallen in love for the first time. 

This Kite looks up at him with so much fire in their big eyes that Ging finds himself looking away.

As he checks out of the hotel he was staying in, he decides he won't bid them goodbye. They're not the kind of person you say goodbye to anymore. They're not the boy who, at the frequent partings, would hold Ging's hand tightly until the last possible second - they're a  _ queen _ , a red-haired menace who demands attention in a way the dead boy never had. Ging doesn't go say goodbye because he knows - and they know - he will come back.

That leaves only one person. 

When he arrives at the train station, Paris is waiting for him. 

“So you're leaving,” Paris says. The wind ruffles his hair. Ging finds himself thinking of how soft it used to feel between his fingers. 

Ging crosses his arms. He isn't carrying any luggage - he leaves the same way he always arrives, with the wind on his face and nothing on his hands. “Yes.”

“Very well.” 

It would sound like a goodbye, except:

"I've seen your zeppelins,” Ging says, and he knows this is him once more tying himself down to this awful man, this is him accepting a silent challenge he has no idea if he can win, this is defiance at its finest. It weighs more heavily at him than his wedding ring ever did, and it's almost like he can breathe more easily with the invisible chain of Paris’ existence tied around his heart.  _ Maybe this is love _ , he thinks.  _ Maybe I loved him. Maybe I never stopped doing so. _ “Your prizes."

"So I heard. Did you like my little souvenir?"

"I'm not gonna let you have this so easily."

“I’m glad,” Paris says, sickly sweet smile on his cruel, pretty lips, the taste of which Ging is still so painfully familiar with. He really does sound glad. “Things get boring without you here.”

Ging eyes the white scar under Paris' delicate chin. “Don't throw yourself out of a window just yet.”

“If I ever do, I'm bringing you down with me.”

Ging smiles. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Oh,” Paris chuckles, big eyes shining with mischief. “You will.”

For a moment, Paris looks exactly like the man he married all those years ago. Ging almost kisses him then, his fingers itching to grab his awful tie and bring him closer.

The train arrives.

"See you," Ging says, turning to board inside. 

"You will," Paris says again. 

Ging doesn't doubt him for a single second. This world may have been too small and boring, but now there's an entire new continent for them to play with. 

Paris’ eyes follow him until the train leaves the station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (heavy breath)
> 
> its 4 am. my hand hurts like a fucking bitch. i've been overthinking this chapter for two weeks and im just tired of finding flaws in it so have it.  
> i have issues with endings. lots of issues. this fic was supposed to be nothing more than a whim, just something to pass the time, and it ended up being so goddamn important to me. these two - i've written over 100 pages on them alone, and i have so many ideas (i literally fucked up my hand bc of how obsessed i am with writing about them all the time). this will Not be the last i write of them - i literally have a continuation of this fic on the works. ging and paris got me inspired to write again, became an hyperfixation for my ocd, and gave me the best, most fantastic girlfriend in the world. and i can't thank them enough except by, i think, writing more. thank you for everyone who read this far, thank you to the ging gc for being so supportive its almost unreal, thank you togashi for giving me these two characters who mean more than the world to me. i hope someone enjoys this clumsy chapter.

**Author's Note:**

> this is so long and there's not even smut yet im sorry next chapter there will be actual sex  
> i just. them *gestures wildly*  
> idk i wrote so much my right hand hurts and i'll have to buy one of those black orthopedic gloves but i hope someone enjoys it? i have no idea if this fic even makes any sense but okay

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [saw my baby down in st. james infirmary (stretched out on that long white table)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18012296) by [okayantigone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/okayantigone/pseuds/okayantigone)




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